IP Replication Network

[Heinz Kern]

Hello everybody,

i do have a quesiton regaridng design. in our company (medium size) it was up to now typical to have a dedicated storage network based on Fibrechannel. interrupt was done by FCoE but this was not a lasting solution. 
but it seems that nowadays vendors of storage solutions strongly recommend to use IP-replicaiton. Now my point is that current assumptions show that the current IP network with it´s oversubscription is not the correct environment for the replicaiton traffic. Therefore my ask is how this is solved in the industry, or especially in the hyperscaler environment:

1. blow up the datacenter network (in our case based on ACI) with additional bandwidth?
2. generate a dedicated infrastructure (comparable to the storage network) based on IP? e.g. additional ACI-POD or any other techology

i was not able to find any documentation about this topic (maybe i am searching wrong). does anybody have experience with that and could point my to any documentaiton or discussions about it?

br + thx

[balaji.bandi]

Most use cases suggests that this should isolated network where possible to minimise the over utilisation when we combine with Public network  - One should take in to account when you planning and designing replication or sync.

some hybrid cloud -

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/data-guide/scenarios/hybrid-on-premises-and-cloud

[Heinz Kern]

thanks for the information. to avoid misunderstanding: we do not deplay a hybrid cloud model here. we are talking of on-premise and the challenge to provide ip replicaiton instead of fibre-channel replication. 

[balaji.bandi]

I still stick to same on-prem or cloud. as long as you have different network ip replication is suggested all time

on-prem  - if not FC - atlease you can provide dedicated Layer 2 Ethernet for replication right ?

As i mentioned before we need evalute some design consideration (choose best option what suitable for business)

If the busines more rely on data and have more delays in replication - that will have impact the business model.

[Heinz Kern]

and here we come to the point of my request: is it best practice to have a decicated network for ip replication? the main problem for me now is that application guys are requesting more or less no oversubscription on this network which is not possible in the normal data network (frontend). i would by highly interested in any design document (doesn´t matter if onprem or cloud).

[balaji.bandi]

its your environment, you should have some kind monitor system - what kind of network utilisation - using exiting network will not cause other issue if you use exiting Data network.

you may find many in the interface google.

best i used market leader netapp

https://www.netapp.com/pdf.html?item=/media/13481-tr4689.pdf